Walter,

The smartest authors and gurus moved early to dotNET to enjoy the vast pool of newbie dotNETters needing books and services, and to enjoy MS patronage. Being an early adopter has advantages for this group. I wish them well and hope as many VFP gurus as possible made it to the top ranks!

Some firms and developers moved to dotNET because their expertise is in development rather than some other business niche, which means their whole value proposition is contemporary development excellence- much easier to demonstrate if you stand tall with MS patronage and with the support of the early adopter gurus.

Some moved to dotNET because of market perceptions. And there there *are* some domains where dotNET makes really good sense.

But data has not been one of those domains. Obviously. Which is why I have been amazed by some statements from people who say they used to be VFP developers.

Well, I think I've figured it out. Most VFP'ers regard data management as so fundamental and essential to our work that we assume that all our peers must take the same view. Large persistent local datasets/cursors, heavy munging at the client, joins between cursors and SQL tables and lookups and aliased tables, local cached lookups with SET RELATION from datasets... it's a given for a VFP'er, right? Well, No! After weird UT exchanges earlier this year I realized that the reason some of the jumpers couldn't see the obvious about data in dotNET, is because while they say they were VFP developers, they never really engaged VFP's data features. In effect, they used VFP for VBish stuff like GUIs atop database stored procedures and simple entry screens. Some of them even used ADO for this and saw benefits in that, quoting VB journals to support their choices.

When it comes to tool comparisons, such people see no value in VFP's data features because they have no experience with them. So their perspective is that of a VB developer. So ADO.NET is perfectly acceptable- they can do all the stuff they've always done, it's just a different way of doing it.

The good news is that people inside MS who *can* see the issues are taking steps that will make the world of difference to VFPers. Even if dotNET is never as good as VFP for all data, there are other compelling issues that may swing the balance. And IMHO we'll see a lot more comfort between those who stay and those who move, because we'll all be talking about the same issues for a change.